This paper is an assessment of what we know about the political determinants of economic growth. It begins by setting out the stylized facts of economic growth. The paper suggests that there is a need to shift away from much of the previous literature's emphasis on the determinants of long-run...

This paper offers an overview of the strengths and limitations in current empirical research on the measurement of state capacity. The paper also surveys the fast emerging literature on the determinants and effects of state capacity. We argue that existing measures on governance quality used in...

The paper examines the questions of which fiscal (public expenditure and taxation) options work in terms of poverty reduction, and how they can be made implementable in practice. The point of departure is that although the poor, acting on their own, are politically weak, nonetheless there are...

This paper addresses institutional and political relationships that govern the interactions between natural resource extraction, economy and society with a focus on the mining and hydrocarbon sectors. These relationships help define the implications of resource extraction for democracy and the...

This paper focuses on four selected questions. (1) How does local political competition and the characteristics of the elected officials matter for the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS)? (2) Is there local capture of the benefits from the scheme? (3) What...

This paper explores the links between social knowledge, social policy and state forms in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its central argument is that the capacities of states to establish inclusive welfare regimes (Gough et al 2004) for citizens are limited by the ways in which states themselves are...

This paper explores what we have learnt about how to instigate, negotiate or otherwise secure pro-poor government in towns and cities of the global South. With competition for scarce resources, the processes of urban development, and specifically the acquisition of land and basic services, are...

This paper offers a political explanation to the problem of spatial inequality in developing countries, paying particular attention to the implications of patronage politics and inter-elite power relations for the spatial distribution of public goods. After showing that existing explanations of...

Political settlement (PS) frameworks are gender blind. In this paper, we interrogate the nature of gendered political settlements through analyzing selected country cases studies of the gendered nature of political and policy-making processes and identifying the different contextual and...

We propose and implement a new technique for measuring the total magnitude of a growth episode: the change in output per capita resulting from one structural break in the trend growth of output (acceleration or deceleration) to the next. The magnitude of the gain or loss from a growth episode...